[nepomuk-kde] Social Desktop in 4.3?

[Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes]

The standardisation efforts for social web things go far beyond the
semantic web - although of course we should put semantic things into as
many things as possible :)

For technologies, there is of course OpenID, now supported by almost
everyone, for basic authentication, there is OAuth for the exchange of
user-data, and there is Google's OpenSocial for social widgets (i.e.
almost like an application framework for social pages, like Facebook apps)

Then there is dataportability.org, which is the main interest group,
joined by google, microsoft, etc. - although in the end they seem to
little more than joining and talking a lot.

I know Dan Brickley, who is behind FOAF, also works hard to on the
intersection of these technologies and semantic web things, he blogs
about it, but his page http://danbri.org/ is unfortunately down at the
moment.

I also talked briefly to Frank Karlitschek about this at Academy last
year, but did not take the time to convince him that joining these
people was the way to go :) (Disclaimer: I've not really followed the
kde social desktop, for all I know has started using all of the above
since then!)

=- Gunnar



Richard Dale wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Tuesday 28 April 2009 17:49:48 Richard Dale wrote:
>>> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
>>>> As some of you know, I've spent some intense cycles on the social desktop
>>>> support in KDE and specifically in Plasma. This functionality integrates
>>>> a social network, in this case openDesktop.org which powers sites such as
>>>> kde- ook.org, kde-apps.org and opendesktop.org. The server-side parts are
>>>> specified in the Open Collaboration Services API, to be seen on
>>>> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-service
>>>> s
>>>>
>>>> The grand vision behind all that is to closely integrate the social web
>>>> into the desktop. What's there right now is the tip of the iceberg.
>>> What I don't understand about this stuff is why it completely ignores
>>> the Sematic Web. Why doesn't it use FOAF for instance, instead of
>>> redoing the same thing in XML? Why do we have one set of ontologies in
>>> Nepomuk, and yet a completely different non-RDF bunch of stuff on the
>>> web?
>> I think that's mainly because it's all still very young technology, but I also
>> have to admit that I don't know enough of the semantic stuff yet to make real
>> sense of it.
> Yes, the RESTful apis actually look very nice and easy to use. It's
> just that I think
> data should be the starting point, and not a specific api. Otherwise,
> we'll just end
> with another 'data silo' even if it has a public open api, because to
> do anything with
> the data well will need to convert it to other formats.
> 
> 
>> Also, the KDE side of these things is not quite there yet. When I was for
>> example looking for a generic concept of a Person (for this, but also for
>> another project), my impression was that Nepomuk is not quite there yet.
> Nepomuk uses different ontologies optimized for the semantic desktop. But
> if the data is in the form of triples it is much easier to transform
> it and combine
> it with other RDF based data. For KDE the semantic web ontologies that seem
> be the most suitable might be:
> 
> * FOAF - info about people
> * SIOC - blogging info
> * SCOT - tags that are connected to semantic web ontologies, rather then just
> being names
> * DOAP - description of a project
> 
>> That's of course the desktop side of things. How this looks on the web, I
>> don't know. Heck, I don't even know FOAF (OK, *now* I know, thanks to
>> Wikipedia ... ;-)).
>>
>> All this is very new, and we're in no way setting things in stone. But I guess
>> it'll take some time until it all fleshes out, becomes clear how this should
>> all be connected, and for the technologies and environment to mature enough so
>> it's actually useful. It's also one of the reasons why I want to get it out
>> there, so visibility increases and more people start working on it. Especially
>> I hope more smarter people than me do. :-)
>>
>> I'm dying to combine all those subjects, but I don't see how to do it at this
>> point in time, pointers are of course welcome.
> I think the name to search for is 'Social Semantic Desktop'. Here is a
> slide show by
> John Breslin (it mentions KDE4):
> 
> http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web-presentation?type=powerpoint
> 
> I'll cc this to the Nepomuk list as the people there know the most
> about it, and I would be
> interested to hear what they have to say about the Social Desktop stuff.
> -- Richard
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